Maria Riboli: "Relate"

A challenging task for any actor, and I believe a beautiful one, is when we are asked to play a character who is "far away" from anything we know and everything we are as human beings.

What do you do when you suddenly have to play a priest from another century and the last time you were in a church was when you were baptized...

How do you approach a cordon blue chef if you even have problems opening a can of chicken soup?
Where do you start building the suburban soccer mom multitasking 5 kids when you love your sex-and-the-city single life?
How do you portray the Bulgarian speaking director when the only thing you can say in any foreigner language is "pasta"?

Well...you start searching and researching...
You search in yourself for any similarities you can possibly find between you and the character...
You research your character, and if you do have to play a cordon blue chef you might go from asking your mom to teach you a couple of tricks in the kitchen to sign up for a cooking course...

You have the job to bring this person to life and to make him or her believable.

Make yourself familiar with this new life you will have to embrace in front of a camera or a stage...

When I start building a character I dig as deep as I can, for me it's also important what she wears, what kind of make up she wears, how she does her hair, on top of course of how she feels inside, the relationships she has, her conflicts and so on ...these kind of things help me creating a character inside and out...

I always call this the "fun part" of acting.
I personally love the research, it connects me deeply with my character and it makes me stronger as an actress.

I find also this process very personal. if you want to share some of this work with your director you should, but you also don't have to.

Your work is yours.

The things you discover are for you, to help you go deeper in your work.

I remember playing a secretary once, and I truly had nothing in common with her at first sight, then the more I started to research her, the more things I found i could relate too.

I remember that during a sense memory exercise I did to work on this character I "discovered" something about her, I knew she would have a specific thing in the drawer next to her in the office.

It wasn't part of the play in se per se, no one else knew about it...but I did put that object in the file cabinet next to chair on the set, no one ever found it, because that drawer wasn't used in the play, and I didn't have to use to the object in the show...but I knew it was there and even that helped me in my work...and no I'm not going to tell you what it was ;)

So once again "keep your eyes open"!

Observe the life in and out of yourself and don't forget to take notes, you'll never know when you will need them.

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” J.R.R. Tolkien